Update! Read All About It.

You may recall that on July 29 pictures were posted with a request for your opinion as to what might be the cause of the lost centers. Comments ranged from fertilizer burn to heat or potting stress to mites. I knew it was not mites, but was pretty open to potting or heat stress since it was very hot this summer and all the plants had recently been repotted.

So here’s what I did. The center of each plant was sprayed with fungicide and gently dabbed dry with a cotton swab. As the new center leaves either completely or partially turned soft and brown, they were totally or partially removed, being very careful not to do any excessive damage to the tiniest new leaves. I removed some of the potting medium from the top so it was slightly below the bottom leaf stems. I did not change my lighting or fertilizer schedule nor did I repot the plants.

Here are the original pictures and ones of the plants two months later.

Yukako looks great. The new leaves have filled in nicely and it has continued to bloom.

The leaves on Lyon’s Fortune Teller are filling in, but it has some major groom secessions coming up in the future.

Ma’s Winter Moon did not recover. However, it did produce some good suckers. Here is one recently potted up to a 2-1/2” pot.

Sora Munchie obviously did not recover either. But, as you can see, it has at least three good strong suckers which will be potted soon.

So now my question is - what would you have done with these plants? Would you have tossed them figuring they had some horrible disease or pest? Would you have worked with them? Since I had already paid once for the two chimeras and didn’t want to order just one plant to get Ma’s Winter Moon again, I opted to work with them. ...... Many thanks to Barb W. for the wonderful pictures and article!!!